Anyone For Air Buccaneers?

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That was a bit of a bust. Not sure what the problem was. I’ll have to fix it when we’ve got more time to experiment. Sorry!

EDIT: Server up again, but likely not for long. Will try to fix it up for tomorrow.

EDIT: Server had crashed, it’s back now. And crashed again. It’s not look very healthy. Working on it. It’s up for now, but not sure why it should be crashing so regularly.

Craig from PC Gamer UK sends word that they’ve got an Air Buccaneers server up and running until May 6th. We had some success with a revival last year, and details for getting started are here. Shall we have a game from, say, 2pm UK time tomorrow? The server should come up in the game browser, or the IP is 85.236.100.18:8077. Reminisce over last year’s events here.

We should do something about this. Its very easy not to suck at the game. All you need to know is how to load a cannon manually. Last year the skill of cannon loader was scarcer than good aimer or good helmsman. A good loader triples your rate of fire and all you have to do is switch between ammunition and torch, clicking once with each on a part of the cannon.

Maybe show up a little early and people could show new players why its so important to manually load and not use the Bot loader?

UT2004 was great, but it took a day to install the CD version. 6 freaking discs! Can anyone remember if a game shipped on more than that? Previous to UT2004, the most discs in my collection was Riven, with 5.

Each ship (I think the large ones are battleships and the smaller ones are called cogs) have several positions on them, the pilot who steers the ship and the cannons on the ship.

The pilot basically tries to fight the wind for the most part, you turn the ship left and right and can make the ship go up and down, the ship will always try to go forward but the wind can fuck it over. You can also use special combos to move the ship – back back up up should boost you forward. You can repair the ship by flying into the bumdles of wood ships that have been destroyed leave floating in the air.

The cannons are loaded and fired by other players, and you try to hit the enemy ships. A lot. There are different types of ammo which I will cover in these abilities you have when you aren’t manning a position:

Telescope – lets you call out targets

defense musket – you can shoot at other players, but it barely hurts them. You use them to deflect incoming shots from cannons.

cutlass – very basic melee attack, really hurts as long as it hits.

gunpowder bag – you can throw these onto the ground as little time bombs, or you can load them into the cannon where firing it turns the cannon into a flamethrower. Very good at close range.

Rockets – If you fire them they deploy into mines that enemy ships can run into, try to set them up in the path of enemy ships. If you load them into cannons they fire a very long distance, in a flat trajectory, but do very little damage compared to a cannonball. you can load a bunch of them at once, however.

Cannonballs – you load them into the cannon and they are fired in a fairly good aproximation of a cannonballs trajectory. The longer you hold down the button to load the cannon when you do it, the more damage the ball does when (if) it hits. It does more damage than the rockets, but doesn’t fire as far.

If you fall off the ship you can press jump twice to try and latch a rope on it. you can also do this to enemy ships – you get points for boarding and taking enemy ships too.

At the end of the game everyone goes to a pub and the game gives rewards for being awesome in various ways.

The maps have differing objectives, but they are fairly easy to get to grips with, and mostly it is about ship to ship combat.

Also, if you fall to the ground, a the ground will try to kill you. It is possible to make it back to your base, but there is little point, dying is usually faster and accomplishes the same thing.

Forgot to mention – the guy manning the cannon can turn it and call for reloading, but cannot load or fire the cannon himself, someone else has to do it. Getting a good two man team on a cannon is fantastic, but if there is no one else there an npc on each ship can be called to load and fire the cannon for you.

I call him the barrel monkey, as he lives in a barrel when he isn’t in use. It is better to use a different player than the barrel monkey.

The barrel monkey is there to hold your hand* if you are still new, though on a few occasions (such as aiming at a cog who has boosted) lighting the fuse then using the cannon doesn’t always give you enough time to aim. I am simply pointing him out.
EDIT: Though it didn’t help I said you couldn’t reload if you use the cannon, when I clearly meant you had to let go and move around to do it yourself. Dumb Petey.
* But he does throw barrel-faeces around, so try not to let him hold your hand.

I have to ask, why are there not organized megagames for this more often, especially by RPS? Once a week would be perfect, and I can’t think of a reason not to just designate a time once a week to play this mode, since you’ll never be able to play it otherwise.

I shall be there, perhaps a little later than 2. Utterly brilliant game, which never really took off due to the learning hump. Once you – and at least a few other players – get the hang of how cannons work (a hint which tends to get ignored for some reason – listen to other players who already know this :) ) it’s glorious.

You know, as impossible as it might be, I’d love to see this game get a port or even a spiritual successor on the Source Engine or UDK. That way people might find it more accessible(without having to install UT2K4),

It’s not in the server browser, and putting “join ipoftheserverherenotactuallythisphrasebuttheipoftheserver” in the console leads to absolutely nothing happening whatsoever. If the server up and I’m just terrible at joining it, or is it down for some reason?

I installed 2K4 (I bought the Unreal pack on Steam back when it was on sale, only ever tried half the games in it so far…) and got the mod running… Can’t get to the server, but I had a mess about on my own with some airships. Wonderful stuff.

@Quasar: I’ll second that motion (Specifically “More of this sort of thing!”. Not that I’m opposed to Natural Selection, just not played it before.)
Like you, I only caught the end, as GrpCpt_Suave, but I liked what was happening. Having taken the crash as an opportunity to map useful tools to my mouse of many buttons, I’m ready to play loader/spotter/rocketeer to someone’s cog.

I’m in Miami, and by no means have a ‘good’ broadband connection, but while the server was up I had pings of ~150, more than playable for airbucs. Great fun, hope the server gets back up soon (maybe just have one map and set the time limit really high so we don’t have to deal too much with end game crashes)

The good news is that I’ve been able to fix it, the bad news is that I’m not quite sure how. I think it might be to do with removing the ‘minplayers’ bit from the server startup script. But I made other changes too, including adding a bunch of extra maps to [DefaultAB MaplistRecord] and reducing the time limit to one minute.

That’s because I removed them. :) The server is now up and running, and doesn’t crash. You do need all of the UT2004 bonux packs installed to use it though — I can’t remove them until I know what the mod uses.

Current server status will likely be crashed, but that great chap Theory has worked out a functional config which he had offered to send to whoever would host a server. I’m hoping we’ll have something working tomorrow.